Hello everyone, I’m starting to evaluate the need to build a NAS/server/home theater DIY setup. I’m doing some research to assemble great hardware. I have a case with 12 bays; obviously, I’ll start with fewer disks, but I’m aiming to have, in a few years, 12 HDDs of 26TB each with 3 parity disks (I…

[image] mud_master96: Is 128GB sustainable with all these TBs? That would be more than enough. [image] mud_master96: If I use a 4TB NVMe as L2ARC It will likely give no benefit…

[image] dan: That would be more than enough. so even with 200tb, 128gb isn’t a limit? This is excellent news The build will generally be used as a NAS, maybe with some light VMs, and to handle some video streams with transcoding via iGPU in 4K HDR. I don’t plan on using deduplication.

[image] mud_master96: so even with 200tb, 128gb isn’t a limit? No. I mean, yes, in a sense it’s going to be limit–ARC obviously can’t exceed available RAM. But it’s highly unlikely to limit performance in any meaningful way. Check your ARC stats after a few weeks of uptime and see how it’s…

Thank you very much, this information makes my hardware choice more flexible. I’ll do as you said. Another thing, would an NVMe for metadata management be useful?

This question comes up a lot. 64gb was more than sufficient for 700TB and a lot of containers on my old build. 128gb is likely more than enough.

Ah… I had understood “in a few years” as referring to accreting drives over the years, and expanding, until eventually reaching 12-wide. While it’s certainly possible to re-use an old desktop into a first NAS, this may result in less-than-optimal hardware. Case in point: [image] mud_master96: T…

You have a case that can take your intend number of drives You’re looking at RAID-Z3 - why? RAID-Z2 means you can lose two drives and still have all the data intact RAM you can never have too much, but you can have too little 128GB is likely over kill but using a NVMe as L2ARC on a home system is …

If you don’t use deduplication, you can probably do just fine with 32 GB of RAM. Dedupe needs the 1 GB/1TB, nothing else. I have a couple of NAS in use, 1 with 24 GB and 1 with 32 GB, I tested the 32 GB one with 64 GB and it made no difference. However if you want to run apps on TrueNAS, you need to…

Tips for beginners: how much RAM is needed?

TrueNAS General

etorix April 27, 2025, 6:09pm 6

A very crude rule-of-thumb is “1 GB per TB”, but it relaxes at high RAM so you do NOT need 200 GB to drive your array. You do need more than the recommended minimum, though, plus some for your apps/VMs, so 64+ GB is possibly not inconsiderate.

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Tips for beginners: how much RAM is needed?

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